Pattern Ghost

Yeah, I watched the video this morning. I got the impression from the trailer that they were actually attempting to honor the material instead of just slap the name on something. Glad to see it passed muster with the man himself. Looking forward to seeing this one. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How so? I watch some BBC stuff, but not familiar with all of their shenanigans.

She's contributed a lot to her field. Definitely deserving of the recognition.

That's b/c it was a joke. Just fake news, nothing to see here.

Thanks, I didn't know what those little curly marks around words meant. 😁 (TBH, I was being a bit unfair to the author, b/c the headlines are often not written by the person writing the article. But the obvious click-baity, biased headline is still annoying.)

Chat GPT Bans Italy: The Great AI Wars Begin

If it only got 5 things wrong, that's pretty amazing, considering past attempts at live action movies in the franchise.

I know, but they still chose to put it into the headline, thus showing their bias. I mean, I'm from Florida, so I know what a bad idea it is to arm more Floridians, trust me. I just found the obvious slant funny. It seems like subtlety has been abandoned, and nobody in the media really cares about putting up the facade of impartiality.

I can tell from the headline that it's going to be an unbiased read.

DOJ reaches tentative $144.5 million settlement with victims of Sutherland Springs church mass shooting

.... woosh! I was making fun of the grammar. 😀 He beat the Grandmaster with his sleight of hand skills one time, too. Managing to trick an Elder of the Universe is pretty impressive.

I think the most salient point it made was "Avengers losed"

Journalism reminds me of that scene from The Princess Bride: It's mostly dead. It may be a little bit alive . . . but it's mostly dead.

I'm not seeing it, but thanks for clarification.

How so? It just looks like bad journalism designed to drive traffic to the site. The article is fairly neutral in tone, albeit the headline seems to slant toward arming teachers being ineffective, which is quite the opposite of what you're positing.

Click bait: "It is also not clear whether those staff members were present on campus when the shooting took place. Police have also not stated yet that any staff members at the school had a gun or fired at the shooter." The headline should read: "A woman who called 911 while hiding under a desk during the shooting said to the dispatcher that one or two staff members carry guns" (Also a direct quote from the article.) I will say that this: “ 'We do have a school person, or two ... I’m not sure ... who would be packing, whose job it is for security. We don’t have security guards, but we have staff.' ” does not strike me as a good idea. It'll be interesting to see if any details come out on whether these armed staff were on campus and what their story was if they were. Hopefully, they exercised good judgement and took care of the students in their classes as their first priority. If they were there, it doesn't seem like any of them were foolish enough to try to hunt down the shooter, at least.

It'd be interesting to see them ranked for how long they feel.

The person who wrote that is very, very bad at analogies.

Somewhat true. But the major components need to be finished, which in the case of the most popular handgun frames requires drilling out and/or cutting off some pieces of plastic from a mostly-finished molded frame, and drilling some holes through it for the pins that hold the actual working parts like the trigger components in. It's not quite on the level of Legos, and can be very fiddly. Mostly, people end up with ill-fitted parts that take a while to get working properly unless they've got some experience in that kind of work or something similar. I'm going to guess an 18 year old prep school student probably doesn't have the shop skills of a middle-aged fabricator, so there's a less than zero probability that whatever he'd put together wasn't really fitted well. Since he was stupid enough to cover his hand with the muzzle, I'm inclined to think he's probably fairly inexperienced around firearms. Most likely this. He may have tried to chamber a round and had a misfeed, then ended up shooting himself because he didn't understand proper malfunction clearing.

They had Columbine.

I remember drills to hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack in grade school. Maybe one of these days, we'll have a generation that doesn't have to drill to futilely hide under desks.

I still can't embrace that kind of thinking. Garbage laws impact the wrong people negatively, and ultimately solve nothing. We'll have to agree to disagree on this point, though I do understand that kind of frustration that drives this kind of approach.

To be honest, that wasn't the line I was thinking along, though certainly fertilizer bombs are one possibility. Probably best not to go into it too far though. I'm not sure about DUIs, but smoking is back up among the younger crowd, or so I heard. I think we now have a generation of teens and young adults who don't really remember the gross out anti-smoking campaigns that well. The screen-raised kids of today certainly won't have to see them.

Thanks. I'm frankly getting sick of these shootings. If we banned semi-auto centerfire rifles outright -- flat out ban, no grandfather clause BS, no concessions -- I'm not sure I'd be too strongly opposed at this point. If a few million responsible people had to lose some of their weapons and it meant one kid's life would be spared, that'd be a fair trade. On the other hand: There had damned well be other equally strong measures going into place at the same time that more directly prevent the killings. God knows what mischief a trip to your local hardware store or car rental place can produce*, so you'd better be taking a hard line on implementing other useful measures as well. *ETA: Then again, most of these killers are low skill morons, so depriving them of their easiest tools may be pretty effective.

And do you think that's what I'm saying? ETA: Not to be confrontational: I just hope you don't think that's what I'm saying. I wrote that while distracted by pain. The thing about the "Biden plan" that annoyed me was just that it was a whole lot of nonsense measures. I'm about as sick of these events as anyone.

It seems like she went directly to the upstairs window and shot whoever she could along the way, so that she could engage the police when they arrived. The intent was definitely suicide. She left messages to that effect shortly before going in.